


Sparkmates

by ivyness



Series: AU Yeah August 2018 [1]
Category: Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, M/M, Megatron calm down, Orion needs a hug, Poetry, Sparkmates, au yeah august
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-01
Updated: 2018-08-01
Packaged: 2019-06-20 10:45:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15532551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivyness/pseuds/ivyness
Summary: How does Megatron, a miner-turned-gladiator, become a poet known throughout Cybertron? It starts with an insatiable greed and a sparkmate who knows how to read.





	Sparkmates

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Victory Condition](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13272438) by [astolat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/astolat/pseuds/astolat). 



> Trigger warning: brief mentions of what could be perceived as self-harm.
> 
> This is inspired by astolat's Victory Condition. Go read it. It's brilliant. Literally all I know about Transformers is thanks to their works.

Megatron has never believed in sparkmates. 

His memory bank holds half-forgotten stories told in moments of quiet in the dark depths of the mines. His fellow miners would tell outrageous tales of how Primus, God of Cybertron, would take sparks from the well and divide the brightest of them in two. Supposedly, when the pieces found each other again, the sparks would be reforged into a newer, brighter whole: Sparkmates.

The only thing Megatron found more outrageous than sparkmates was the idea of Primus.

So, when he actually finds his sparkmate he has no idea what’s going on. All he knows is that for the first time in fifty-thousand years of fighting, he decides to look up from the killing floor into the stands of the arena. 

The bot looks clean. Small and trembling in the stands, shying away from his violence-heady neighbors. When their optics meet he can feel his spark shifting in its chamber, changing. 

He feels fear crawling up the back of his throat, but he is used to fear; he has faced it everyday in the arena and he knows exactly what to do with it. Megatron charges the stands.

He’s already jumped the wall of the stands by the time his handlers figure out what’s going on. He can hear their yelling as he shoves the panicking spectators out of his way, optics intent on the small bot scurrying down the stands, closer to Megatron’s bloodthirsty reach. 

His fingers just barely brush a delicately painted red arm before he feels chains curling around him, jerking him back. But it’s more than enough. Megatron screams in rage and fear as he feels his spark shift and make room for a second spark in his chamber. He fights against the chains that the handlers have wrapped around him, their stun batons digging cruelly into the delicate wiring beneath the joins of his plating. He shivers, feeling helpless as his spark entwines itself with another and he fights hard against it, blind with rage and pain. He howls, feeling a panic that doesn’t belong solely to himself. 

He blacks out.

The next time Megatron comes online, he finds himself in an isolation chamber angry at himself for letting his guard down. He had simply never believed he could have a sparkmate.

Megatron doesn’t know how long he’s been in the arena. Too long, he thinks. For years he’s stepped out onto the killing floor, the spectators more bloodthirsty than his opponents, and looked death in the face. The fear and adrenaline have almost become boring in their monotony. He’d gotten careless and that’s how he’s found himself in this situation. He has to be more careful. 

A stranger prods at his spark. Megatron’s already launching his strongest anti-malware program but it aborts, not recognizing anything wrong with the foreign presence in his spark chamber. Of course, he thinks, it’s my sparkmate. 

His spark chamber vibrates and he feels more than hears a whispered, Orion.

And Megatron slams all his inhibitors down trying to block out the strange presence, but it’s no use; their sparks have already merged. He recognizes that sad, resigned presence, so foreign from his own. I’m sorry.

Enraged, he slams at the wall, impotent. 

*****************************

The only good thing to come out of this whole mess for Megatron is learning to read and write. The thing about sparkmates is that it’s not just the sparks that merge. When he next wakes up a whole host of new protocols take up space in his primary memory banks, all meticulously calibrated for the small delicate hands and data ports of a scribe.

Megatron takes perverse pleasure in tearing into these new protocols, reworking them and fitting them right next to his automated combat modules.

There are still some that won’t work for him. Some that never will. He doesn’t have the right build or the delicate hardware necessary for writing. His hands were made to rip through rock and metal hundreds of thousands of feet below the surface. He’s used his hands to rip a bot’s spark out of their chest. Using these hands to write feels almost sacrilegious, and he’s not the praying sort. Besides, he doesn’t even have a datapad to write with.

But he keeps them all anyway, tucked safely deep in the recesses of his personal memory bank. They’re his now and no one’s taking them from him, whether he can use them or not. 

Orion’s spark vibrates in his chest and he hears a mental voice say, I can teach you. My dataport can access all the public databanks and you can use my datapad and - 

And the voice cuts out in pain as Megatron tears at the plating in his arm, sparks flying, his pain sensors relaying hundreds of ignored messages to his nerve center. He’ll need to go to the infirmary to get his arm fixed but it’s worth it. Megatron already knows what he’s lost, what he never had access to in the first place. He was meant to live ignorant and in the dark.

He was never meant to crawl up from the mines into the sunlight. But crawl he did. And when he broke his way out he found himself graduated to rabid animal, a gladiator tearing into everyone around him for the amusement of those who sat high in the stands. Never again. He won’t be baited and will never be brought to heel.

He’s here now; this is who he is. And he fights down the greed and rage that whisper to him, Not enough, never enough.

*****************************

Things continue like this for a while. Everytime Orion tries to talk to him, Megatron taps into his own nerve center, stimulating pain sensors. He’s found that he can use his imagination center to generate an unpleasant enough sensation to send the other bot running without breaking his own arm again.

Orion hasn’t tried to contact him for a while. Just when Megatron begins to hope that Orion’s given up, he wakes up one morning to find a new subroutine attached to his hoarded reading and writing protocols. He knows immediately who it’s from and he knows he should delete it. Should’ve deleted all the other strange protocols that his sparkmate has given him but he can’t. Instead he finds himself hastily tearing into it.

It’s a grammar analysis routine. It’s surprisingly complex and takes up way too much space but Megatron hoards it anyway. Running it over and over by itself and in conjunction with his reading protocol. Digging through his memory banks in search of words words words, it’s heady. It’s amazing how much they’ve hidden behind his back. His overseers, his handlers. Never again, he thinks viciously.

Each day he wakes up with more strange routines and procedures and processes and memories and he knows he should put a stop to this, that this is Orion’s way of winning, but he can’t help it he wants too much.

Megatron finally breaks when Orion gives him a poetry routine. He runs it over and over but just can’t figure it out. Why would anyone try to restrict their words by arbitrary rules and timings? What purpose does it serve? It’s driving Megatron mad and there’s only one bot he can ask.

And so he reaches out and Orion opens his own personal memory banks sharing with him thousands upon thousands of poems.

Something changes in Megatron on this day but if he could explain it in something other than poetry, he wouldn’t have to write a poem to say it. This is the day Orion gives birth to the Voice of Tarn. Future leader of the Decepticons, slayer of Primes, harbinger of revolution. 

*****************************

Once you learn to read you will never be free  
Once you’ve stolen from hands who denied you  
You will never forget  
Once you know what you almost never had  
You will never forgive  
See the shackles that once bound you and  
Look to those who knew and stole and blinded  
Never forgive  
Never forget  
Never let them be free of you

They walk with eyes blinded  
Hear with deafened ears  
Speak with strangled truths  
It was a truth known too true, refused to be thought.  
We are sent to slaughter  
With a public where  
And a published why  
By a gloried goried who  
They trade us their greed  
For one more moment in sunlight  
While we grope in the darkness  
Buried  
Under the monument  
To their lust for life

Once you learn to read you will never be free  
I will haunt you with my truths  
Come to me with eyes wide open  
And we will strike down those  
Who blind eyes with blind eyes  
We will no longer let them  
Use our parts to build their cities  
We are the foundation  
And are buried in the dark  
We will rise  
From the mines  
From the pits  
From the killing floor  
And we shall take on the name destroyer  
We will tear down their city  
Their monument of lies  
To be buried no more  
To walk in sunlight  
And we will never forget  
We will never forgive  
Call us decepticons  
For no more  
We will never be deceived


End file.
